Matthew Quick takes a new road

Local author Matthew Quick has followed up his best-selling “Silver Linings Playbook,” which became an Oscar- nominated screenplay, with his second adult novel, “The Good Luck of Right Now.”

“It’s a quest novel,” he said in a recent interview. “All the characters are going on a quest, but they have different reasons.”

At 38, protagonist Bartholomew Neil has never held a job, never gone on a date. He’s spent a sheltered life with his mother, who has told her son that he doesn't have the kind of intelligence that schools are able to measure.

When his mother succumbs to brain cancer, Bartholomew has to learn to live on his own.

His grief counselor tells Bartholomew to leave the nest and find a flock of his own.

Bartholomew is searching to create a new family late in life, Quick said, and he has to learn to pick up the fragmented pieces of his old life.

He does this in an unlikely way.

Sorting through his mother’s belonging after her death, Bartholomew finds a letter from Richard Gere hidden in her underwear drawer. It’s a form letter, encouraging her to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a way of supporting Tibet.

Bartholomew doesn’t know why his mother got the letter or why she saved it, any more than he knows why, in her final days, she liked watching “Pretty Woman” or started calling him “Richard.”

He sees the letter as a sign that Gere is meant to help him somehow, and he writes to the actor, chronicling his attempts at achieving an adult life with a child’s candor.

“The letters are a coping mechanism for the problems he faces,” Quick said.

Quick chose to tell his story through letters because he has found that people will write the most intimate details of their lives to a celebrity.

In the spotlight that has shone on him since “Silver Linings,” Quick says he has received letters that shared intimate details the writers wouldn’t share with family or best friends.

He doesn’t know why this is so, but was pleased that a conversation was opened about mental health.

“The letters are almost like throwing a penny in a wishing well,” he said. “You really don’t expect to get anything back. If Bartholomew was telling his story face to face, it would be a different one than he told Richard Gere.”

The book also explores the concept of synchronicity, the idea that events may be meaningfully related, even though they have nothing to do with each other.

Like discovering a form letter from an actor and having that become the impetus to change a life.

Quick said he feels that there is an idea of balance, or cosmic order in the stories we tell ourselves.

There’s the same concept of balance in a theory that Bartholomew’s mother held. Bad events are always followed by good events, at least somewhere in the world.

Bartholomew tries to sustain himself with that belief and his one-way correspondence with Gere as he sets off on a road trip to Canada with his newly assembled “family,’’ a bipolar priest, a librarian and her cat-loving, expletive-spewing brother.

Bartholomew’s goal is to find his father, a man he has never met and heard almost nothing about.

As the head of his own emotionally ragtag band, Bartholomew is unfailingly kind. He almost has a genius for it.

“No doubt, I am a big believer in the power of empathy or kindness,” Quick said. “People measure intelligence wrong. Emotional intelligence is not valued by society.”

Kindness or empathy is the challenge society faces when confronted with characters such as the ones in “Good Luck.” They’re people whose psyches have been through a wringer and come damaged out the other side. They’re a little different than everyone else and that should be OK, he said.

“As a writer, an artist, I am always trying to champion people who are different,” Quick said. “Society puts too high an importance on homogeny.”

His characters make a point of visiting Ottawa, where they go to see Cat Parliament (recently closed). It’s a sanctuary for cats who were once brought in to keep pest populations under control. Quick visited it himself a few years back.

“It was weird, odd and beautifully humane,” he said.

Asked if he would like to have his book described that way, he answered, “I would be happy if someone described it that way.”

“The Good Luck of Right Now” is in development for film, as is one of Quick’s young adult novels, “Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock.”

His other young adult novels have been optioned for film.

While that is something to look forward to, Holden’s connection to Hollywood is leaving town, and that is something that is not.

The beneficiary of Holden’s bad luck is North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where Quick and his wife, novelist and musician Alicia Bessette, are moving before the end of the winter.

He and his wife are looking forward to living in a warmer climate and for Quick, it will fulfill a lifelong goal of living by the shore.

He is taking fond memories. Quick wrote four books while he lived in Holden and said he was “grateful for the time I had here.”